Ukrainian jet crash takes at least 83 lives

LVIV, Ukraine -- Hundreds of tearful relatives waited anxiously outside an overcrowded morgue Sunday while forensic officials tried to identify the mangled remains of victims of a Ukrainian military jet crash that killed at least 83 people at an air show.\nVolodymyr Bukhach, 35, wept as he stood waiting for information from the morgue, unsure whether his wife was alive. He said his two children, aged 6 and 10, survived Saturday's crash, but he could not locate his wife.\n"We called, we went looking at the hospitals, but we couldn't find her," Bukhach said. "We couldn't find her and got no information."\nHe said nobody answered a telephone hot line number he was given.\nA Soviet-era Su-27 fighter jet was performing risky aerobatic maneuvers at Sknyliv air base in the city of Lviv when it nicked the ground and sliced through a crowd of hundreds of spectators before exploding in a huge ball of fire.\nYevhen Marchuk, the chief of Ukraine's Security and Defense Council, who is heading the investigation, told a news conference Sunday that 83 people were killed, including 19 children, and 116 others injured.\n"These are sad statistics," Marchuk said.\nLawmaker Taras Chornovil said morgue officials had identified 68 bodies, but Marchuk said the process of identification was going slowly because of the badly mangled condition of the other victims. Many of the bodies were in pieces.\n"The highest priority is to identify these people," he said.\nLviv residents on Sunday began two days of official mourning, which was announced by city governor Liubomyr Buniak, who was at the air show with his wife and daughter when the plane tore through the crowd. They all survived.\nOn Sunday, Defense Minister Vladimir Shkidchenko submitted his resignation, which was being considered by President Leonid Kuchma, the Defense Ministry's press service said.\nKuchma appointed Shkidchenko, a former army general staff, last October to replace Oleksandr Kuzmuk, who was fired after a Ukrainian missile downed a Russian passenger jet over the Black Sea.\nMeanwhile, officials said that the commander of the air force and a top officer from the 14th Air Corps, who were fired by Kuchma on Saturday, have been arrested.\nGen. Col. Vladimir Strelnikov and Lt. Col. S. Opyshchak are suspected of committing a crime classified as "negligent attitude to the military service that led to heavy consequences," the Prosecutor General's office said.\nThey are being held in jail pending investigation. A court will decide whether to arrest the two pilots after they recover from their injuries, prosecutors said.\nThe two main possible causes of the crash being considered were carelessness by the pilots or mechanical failure.\nPresident Bush expressed condolences about the plane crash in a letter to Kuchma Sunday, his spokeswoman Olena Hromnytska said. Similar letters were received from British Prime Minister Tony Blair and French President Jacques Chirac, she said.\nPope John Paul II, in a condolence message sent Sunday, offered prayers for victims and his spiritual closeness for survivors.\n"I can think of nothing that could relieve my grief," said Olha Dudchenko, standing outside the morgue holding photos of her 7-year-old daughter Mariana, whom she identified Sunday morning.\nThe daughter and her husband Serhiy, a doctor, went to the airfield to listen to a children's choir, where Mariana's friend performed, when they were killed by the cartwheeling wreckage of the jet.